Metalanguage
In linguistics, a technical or second-order language used to describe and analyze a natural or first-order language. More generally, any descriptive discourse such as literary criticism can be said to function as a metalanguage. According to Jakobson, the process of acquiring or learning a language involves many metalinguistic operations. He also argues that all speakers of a language also use a metalanguage without realizing it in order to ensure that they are using the same code as their interlocutors.
The very possibility of a metalinguistic dimension is denied by many of the thinkers associated with poststructuralism, postmodernism and deconstruction. Lacan, for example, flatly denies the existence of any metalanguage, basing his claim on Heidegger's contention that language is the 'house of being' and that it is impossible to step outside it.[1] In Heidegger's view, any metalanguage is a metaphysics and a 'technicalization' that destroys the experience of a language.
Most of the philosophers associated with the linguistic turn take a similar view and argue, like Wittgenstein, that there can be no metalinguistic or extralinguistic dimension betcause "the limits of my language are the limits of my world" or, like Derrida, that "there is nothing outside the text."
Metalanguage is the technical term in linguistics for any form of language which is used to describe the properties of language.
Roman Jakobson includes the metalingual function in his list of the functions of language.[2]
Lacan's first reference to metalanguage comes in 1956, when he echoes Jakobson's view on the metalingual function of all language: "all language implies a metalanguage, its already a metalanguage of its own register."[3]
A few years later, in 1960, he says precisely the opposite, arguing that "no metalanguage can be spoken."[4]
What Lacan appears to mean by this remark is that, since every attempt to fix the meaning of language must be done in language, there can be no escape from language, no "outside."
This is reminiscent of Heidegger's views on the impossibility of exiting "the house of language."
This also appears similar to the structuralist theme of il n'y a rien hors du texte ('there is nothing outside the text'), but it is not the same; Lacan does not deny that there is a beyond of language (this beyond is the real), but he does argue that this beyond is not of a kind that could finally anchor meaning. There is, in other words, no transcendental signified, no way that language could "tell the truth about truth."[5]
The same point is also expressed in the phrase; "there is no Other of the Other."[6] If the Other is the guarantee of the coherence of the subject's discourse, then the falsity of this guarantee is revealed by the fact that the guarantor himself lacks such a guarantee. In a clinical context, this means that there is no metalanguage of the transference, no point outside the transference from which it could be finally interpreted and 'liquidated'.
